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Title : "The Senate voted 51 to 48, with no Republican defections and no Democratic support."
link : "The Senate voted 51 to 48, with no Republican defections and no Democratic support."

"The Senate voted 51 to 48, with no Republican defections and no Democratic support."

I'm up at 5 a.m. reading the NYT about the big tax bill that passed the Senate at 1 a.m.

Did you stay up for the drama — for the exultations and lamentations?

The approval of the bill in the House and Senate came over the strenuous objections of Democrats, who have accused Republicans of giving a gift to corporations and the wealthy and driving up the federal debt in the process.

As the final vote approached in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, gave his closing argument against the bill and scolded his Republican colleagues for talking during his remarks on the floor.

“This is serious stuff,” Mr. Schumer said. “We believe you’re messing up America. You could pay attention for a couple of minutes.”

What a turnabout turnabout from 8 years ago, when the Senate voted on Obamacare:

With the supermajority... the Senate moved rather quickly to pass the ACA – or ObamaCare – on Christmas Eve 2009 in a 60 – 39 vote.... Everyone assumed that the Christmas Eve 2009 Senate bill would be tweaked considerably to conform more with the House bill passed two months previously. But now that strategy wouldn’t work, because [after the Republican Scott Brown won the special election in Massachusetts] the Democrats no longer had the 60th vote in the Senate to end debate. What to do? They decided to have the House take up the identical bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve. It passed on March 21, 2010, by a 219 – 212 vote. This time, no Republicans came on board, and 34 Democrats voted against. President Obama signed the ACA legislation two days later on March 23.

The rancor has not abated since, as we all know. Republicans invoked Thomas Jefferson’s observation that “great innovations should not be forced on a slender majority – or enacted without broad support.” They cited broad legislative innovations like Social Security and Medicare, both of which enjoyed bipartisan support. They complained that one fewer vote in the Senate or a change of four votes in the House would have been enough to defeat ObamaCare. Democrats responded just as vociferously and passionately that this healthcare reform package was too important and overdue to delay or compromise.

And now the Republicans have their big achievement, too important and overdue to delay or compromise.

The NYT ends its story with a quote from — of all people — Bob Packwood:

Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon who helped lead the 1986 tax effort, said that this year’s bill was at least as sweeping as the one that Ronald Reagan signed into law 31 years ago, even though the bills had different goals.

“They have achieved things that I was unable to achieve,” Mr. Packwood said.

Dredging up Bob Packwood feels like a desperate/poignant effort to make the GOP look bad. Packwood was driven from the Senate in 1995. He was the face of sexual harassment in the crucial interval between the unsuccessful effort to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court and the unsuccessful effort to oust Bill Clinton from the presidency.
From Packwood's Wikipedia page:

[In] 1992... a Washington Post story detailed claims of sexual abuse and assault from ten women, chiefly former staffers and lobbyists.... [Packwood] divulge[d] 5,000 pages to the Senate Ethics Committee but balked when a further 3,200 pages were demanded by the committee. It was discovered that he had edited the diary, removing what were allegedly references to sexual encounters and the sexual abuse allegations made against him. Packwood then made what some of his colleagues interpreted as a threat to expose wrongdoing by other members of Congress. ...

Despite pressure for open hearings from the public and from female Senators, especially Barbara Boxer from California, the Senate ultimately decided against them. The Ethics Committee's indictment, running to ten-volumes and 10,145 pages, much of it from Packwood's own writings, according to a report in The New York Times, detailed the sexual misconduct, obstruction of justice, and ethics charges being made against him. The chairman of the Ethics Committee, Republican senator Mitch McConnell, referred to Packwood's "habitual pattern of aggressive, blatantly sexual advances, mostly directed at members of his own staff or others whose livelihoods were connected in some way to his power and authority as a Senator" and said Packwood's behaviour included "deliberately altering and destroying relevant portions of his diary" which Packwood himself had written in the diary were "very incriminating information."...

Packwood resigned, and a Democrat won the special election to replace him. McConnell said that they knew the seat — the state was Oregon — would be taken by a Democrat but the choice came down to "retain the Senate seat or retain our honor."

It's interesting to see Packwood poke up in the NYT article this morning. But, in fact, he was important in getting the Reagan era tax bill passed. He was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. He was also key to the defeat of the Clinton Era health care bill — HillaryCare — in 1993.

And yet, who thinks of him now, except as a sexual harassment villain? Looking back on his story, I see one powerful man who fell. The focus became limited to one individual, and he was pushed into resigning, and the institution continued, preening that it had preserved its "honor."

But the institution protected itself. Who were the other colleagues Packwood threatened to expose? How much more sexual harassment took place in the Senate over the next quarter century? We the people were led to think that the Packwood resignation meant that sexual harassment would now be taken seriously — now that the Republicans were taking it seriously.

But it was not long before Democrats were hooting down anyone who wanted to listen to what Paula Jones had to say about Bill Clinton. It's just sex. Americans are so puritannical. What's the matter don't you like blow jobs?

Since the NYT had Bob Packwood on the phone, they should have asked him what he thinks about how long it's taken Congress to get serious over sexual harassment and whether his resignation was worth it, who were those other members of Congress you were threatening to expose back then, and were you not part of a great silencing?

Thus Article "The Senate voted 51 to 48, with no Republican defections and no Democratic support."

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